Crowdfunding: Is There Porn Of It?
Monday, May 23rd, 2016 -- by Bacchus
For reasons that will be explained in a post appearing soon, I am looking into crowdfunding (preferably Patreon-style) in order to try and improve the depth and quality of posting here at ErosBlog. However, I am reluctant to use a crowdfunding platform that’s openly hostile to porn. There seems to be a crowdfunding-industry consensus around allowing adult projects (sort of) as long as they are not “pornography” or “sexually explicit”, leaving those terms undefined. The rules on all platforms currently seem to boil down to some version of “We’ll allow your adult project, but if it becomes contentious or attracts any sort of negative attention, we’re reserving the right to redefine whatever you’re doing as ‘porn’ and blow you off our platform while pretending you were never welcome in the first place.”
Trouble is, I’m proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and cynical commentary about platforms used by pornography enthusiasts. So I’m looking for a crowdfunding platform that won’t make me lie about what I love to do. I don’t doubt that with a bit of careful fancy-dancing I could use one of the porn-squeamish platforms, at least for awhile. But I would hate to get invested (or to get my patrons invested) in a platform where the official policy is to prohibit porn officially while tolerating it on a case-by-case basis as long as it doesn’t get too uppity.
Here are the results of my first round of quick research into the porn policies at a few of the most popular platforms that sometimes allow adult projects:
- Patreon: “Patreon is not for pornography.”
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as NSFW in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
- Indiegogo: currently prohibits “sexually explicit” projects.
Do not post images or videos that are sexually explicit or post links to sites that contain sexually explicit material.
- Kickstarter: “We prohibit…pornographic material.”
- Offbeatr: Closed 2/8/16. Sounds like #pornocalypse in action:
We’d like to thank all our customers and users for supporting Offbeatr throughout our years but the website will be closing indefinitely due to changes in corporate structure.
So, what have I missed? Is there a single crowdfunding platform out there that is officially open to projects featuring pornography and sexually explicit material?
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